SGML: Physics

This relates to proposal 3/16 (backruns of numerous American and
British physics journals.)

The Institute of Physics is currently engaged in publishing
digitally, on CD-ROM, about 5 titles (out of a total 35) for about 4
years back.

The American Physical Society is half way through a project to scan
1988 - 1993 issues of Physical Review. A subsequent phase
may scan all earlier issues (roughly 1893 to 1988). A project to convert
back issues of Physical Review Letters (the Society's only
other journal) into SGML
format is under consideration, but will depend on the outcome of
interest in Physical Review. These projects are undertaken on a
commercial basis.

Simultaneously, two related projects are also under way with the
co-operation of the Society. The Los Alamos laboratory has scanned all
Physical Review titles for 1990 to 1995; and the Naval
Research Laboratory has converted the text (without figures, equations
etc.) of
Physical Review E and Physical Review Letters for
the same period into searchable form. The projects are related because
the intent is to combine the searchable text with the page images to
make a usable, searchable archive. At this point, the material is for
use within the laboratories only.

Elsevier's TULIP project has digitised 43 journals on materials
science, all published by Elsevier
Science. The digitised journals cover the period 1992 - 1995. Some
may be taken to cover the field of Physics; but the titles are all
published by Elsevier Science.

The SPIRES-HEP database at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Library has been collecting digital
versions of pre-prints of journal papers in the field of high energy
physics. As of late 1993, the collection had reached over 3,600 papers,
and was growing at approximately 100 papers per week. This is thought to
represent a significant proportion of publications in the field. While
this is different to entire journals, it is likely that the content of
some journals in this specialist field will be represented in their
entirety in this database. A similar database is held at CERN in Geneva.

There are numerous other deposits of pre-prints at other sites on
the Internet. An
example of a site which lists several is
http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/physics-services/physics_publ.html.